Does the Hybrid Car Fit Our Lifestyles?

Our automobile should be able to go 300 miles before re-fueling, it needs to re-fueled quickly, and it must be able to keep up with other traffic. Gas engines come in various sizes. The bigger the engine, the more powerful it is and the more gas it uses, vs the smaller the engine, the slower the acceleration, the better the gas mileage. In both cases, there is pollution involved. An electric car will travel a short distance, around 50-100 miles, and is slow and does not pollute. This type of car is also inconvenient to re-charge.What we need is an automobile that is efficient on gas, that cuts pollution more than half of what the gas powered cars do, and can still be re-fueled quickly and eliminate the need to inconveniently re-charge batteries. One answer is in the Hybrid car.There are two different ways the Hybrid car’s power can be combined. The Parallel Hybrid can have the gas engine and electric motor turn the transmission and wheels. The Series Hybrid is where the gasoline engine turns a generator which charges the batteries and then powers the electric motor which turns the transmission and wheels. The gasoline engine does not directly power the vehicle. The Toyota Prius came out with the Power Split device which allows the car to operate with both the parallel and series systems. With this system, the gasoline engine and electric motor can work independently in providing the power, or they can work together in providing the power. The power device eliminates the need for a manual or automatic transmission and uses a continuously variable transmission instead. The generator also starts the engine, so this eliminates the starter.I like the Toyota Prius because of how it’s designed. It can seat 5 people and according to what I’ve written, it also has the better drive system. The price starts around $23,000 and can get over 50 mpg. It has 4 doors, good sized cargo space, simple dashboard, most controls are on the steering wheel. This website ( http://www.toyota.com/prius-hybrid/ ) gives good information about this remarkable automobile.